A new study suggests that a doctor's positive message when prescribing medication can have an impact on the effectiveness of the treatment. The study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine showed that taking migraine pills accompanied by a positive information that it is an effective drug, increases the effectiveness of the treatment, regardless of whether the patient has taken the real medication or not.
Researchers from the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston tested the effectiveness of the common migraine drug Maxalt, known generically as rizatriptan, and a placebo in 66 migraine sufferers. The subjects were told that Maxalt is effective in reducing pain and that the placebos were sugar pills that would do nothing. Unknown to the subjects, the pills they take during migraine attacks were mixed up. The pills labeled Maxalt were either the real medication or a placebo and vice versa. Sometimes the pills were labeled "Maxalt or placebo".
The researchers said they found positive response among those who were told they were given the effective medication. "When migraine patients were told by their doctor that a pill would help ease their headaches, this advice seemed to produce results whether or not the pill was a real migraine medication or a dummy placebo," said Andrew Charles, professor and director of the headache research and treatment program in the department of neurology at University of California School of Medicine in Los Angeles.
Although the relief is better with the actual medicine, the researchers say that the placebo effect may be responsible for half of the therapeutic value of a drug. "Every word you say counts, not only every gram of the medication," said Ted Kaptchuk, senior author of the study and a professor of medicine at Harvard. "The more we gave a positive message to the patient, the bigger the placebo effect was."
Kaptchuk also said that the effects may not be purely psychological because the ritual of taking a medication may trigger some subconscious memory that could make people feel better regardless of whether they knew they have taken a fake drug.
